


Really Rosie

by Gehayi



Category: 1940s American History RPF, Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Rosie the Riveter - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Illustrated, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Shapeshifting, Tall Tales, The Power of Story, myth-making
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 17:54:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6867394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gehayi/pseuds/Gehayi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The birth, battles, execution and resurrection of Rosie the Riveter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Birth of Rosie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IShouldBeWriting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShouldBeWriting/gifts).



> **Prompt:** Sure, we all know about the reality of Rosie, who she really was and why the government made the propaganda posters. But what was her life and her job really like? What did she go home to at the end of the day? Was there a soldier out there whom she waited for? Was she really what she appears to be, or did she become something bigger, more magical and spiritual as the distillation of so many things our country needed to believe in that moment?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A shapeshifting female cultural icon comes into being.

Most folks nowadays, if you ask them about Rosie the Riveter, will either give you a blank-eyed stare and ask you who the hell _she_ is or will say something about World War II and a big ol' yellow poster. You've probably seen it somewhere on the intertubes: a thirtyish woman in a work shirt with a polka-dotted red bandana covering her black curls, her fist upraised as she proclaims in bold letters, "WE CAN DO IT!"

But that picture isn't what made Rosie come to life. Oh, the poster gave a face to who and what she was, but a song came first. And that song, which spoke of a determined, fearless, hard-working woman who was alert for sabotage and who was as loyal to the red, white and blue as Uncle Sam himself, was what made her real. Because in 1942, everyone in America was singing that song.

Now, there's power in music. People talk about putting heart and soul into singing, and it's true. The song of Rosie the Riveter weren't sweet in a way that would charm folks with sentiment or bewitch critics; it wasn't filled to the brim with notes that made courage and heroism seem inevitable. But it told the story of countless women on the home front, doing jobs they had never dreamed possible a year before and frettin' about their family members, friends and sweethearts over in Tunisia, Dieppe, Guadalcanal, and the island of Midway, and it gave them something to believe in, to aspire to. Something shaped like a person. 

Gods have been born from less. 

There are different stories about just _how_ Rosie sprang into existence. Some say that she just appeared on a moving bus that moved flawlessly through the gray hours just before dawn, a creature of hopes and dreams and song that disembarked at a factory whose doors opened into all American factories. Others swear that she was born on an assembly line that had gone silent for the night, her rivet gun in her hands. Still others insist that buckets of brand-new rivets from all across the U.S. of A. teleported to a factory in the exact center of the country and transformed into living flesh, though it's hard to credit that. Taking materials that could build a Jeep, a plane, or a weapon, all of which could save lives, just wasn't Rosie's style, not then, not ever.

But the oldest tale says the part about newly made rivets is wrong, and that Rosie was born from hundreds of thousands of pieces of scrap metal—flatirons and rakes, children's wagons and car bumpers, chicken wire and andirons, all from the apotheosis of scrap drives. Some of the pieces were tooth-edged and rusty; others seemed too outsized and clunky or too tiny and fragile to be useful; and still other bits were buckled and broken and bent. But almost all twisted and intertwined with memories, and the memories and the metal and the music mixed and mingled, making a woman who had forge-fire in her muscle and the strength of tanks in her bones, a thousand times a thousand recollections clamoring in her mind, and a fierce song—half sound, half emotion—for her soul.

Women factory workers knew that a new hero was about in the land, though not even they always recognized Rosie. Not too surprising, as Rosie was—and _is_ —a shapeshifter. She was born to be the Spirit of the Home Front and the Hero of Working Women, after all, and there were so many different ways for an American woman to look that the only way Rosie could be herself was to be all of them. So right from the beginning, Rosie was young and old and middle-aged, Native American and India-Indian and Latino and Asian, black and white, cis and trans, every orientation and religion and culture imaginable—and if those who painted her, composed lyrics about her and directed films about her didn't realize this, then the shame was theirs, not hers.

[Kay Lamphear, Defense Plant Worker at Allis Chalmers Manufacturing Company in Wisconsin, 1942. This Indian woman operated a punch press, machining diaphragm blades for airplane engines. During World War II many Indian women and men worked in defense plants and the airplane industry as riveters, machinists, and inspectors. The tribes also purchased war bonds or donated money to the war effort. Photo by Ann Rosener, courtesy of Library of Congress](http://publications.newberry.org/indiansofthemidwest/people-places-time/eras/sovereignty/).

[Bertha Stallworth, age twenty-one, inspecting the end of a forty millimeter artillery cartridge case at the Frankfort [i.e. Frankford] Arsenal, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 1943. Photo by Howard R. Hollem, courtesy of Library of Congress](http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001039524/PP/).)

[Flanger](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flanger) [Lonnie Yee Young, Sausalito shipyards, Sausalito, California. 1942. Photo courtesy of Wanda Young Ching and Connie Young Yu](https://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/chinese/38.html).)

([This is a portrait of female Southern Pacific Railroad company employees during World War II, in the early 1940s. Identified in the photograph are Celia Morelos Pain, Brijida Vasquez, Rebeca Andrade, Ramona Herran Robles, Lily Valenzuela Liu, and Juana Lujan. The photograph was taken in Tucson, Arizona. Donated by Ramona Lucero.](http://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/ahsmexican/id/324/rec/3))

Folks got to know when Rosie was around, though. Each fuselage and chassis seemed to build itself; supervisors grew more courteous; hangovers—the bane of every soldier, sailor, Marine, and pilot, who dreaded getting weapons or supplies crafted by someone who, to put it charitably, was suffering from an off day—simply vanished; the machines were unwilling to mangle human bodies and faces with steam, molten metal, or gear-teeth; the work itself ran smooth and fast and flawless. 

And sometimes, sometimes on days like that, a worker would see an unfamiliar woman with a rivet gun in her arms, usually with her hair tied up in a bandana as red as the stripes on the American flag. She wouldn't say much, but if someone explained what this supposedly transferred worker needed to do, everyone would understand it better after that. Anyone who was skipping meals to save money would find a sandwich, an apple or a pear near their seat around noon. Oh, never anything that couldn't have been brought in any worker's silver lunch box; Rosie was too young to perform overt miracles. The most she could manage were startling coincidences. But folks knew. They knew she was there, and listening, and on their side.

So it's not too surprising that women started switching from wearing any old bandana to keep their hair up to crimson bandanas like Rosie's, often with flaring white bombs that looked like polka dots, and light blue shirts. WOWs, they were called—Woman Ordnance Workers. 

(Pictured: 1943 Woman Ordnance Worker poster by Arthur Treidler.) 

But everyone knew what it really meant. _We're Rosie's girls,_ the impromptu uniform said—for back in the Forties, grown women, even middle-aged mothers and elderly grandmothers, called themselves "girls." _We're America. And we're proud._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE SONG
> 
> [The song "Rosie the Riveter," written by Redd Evans and composed by John Jacob Loeb, was issued by Paramount Music Corporation of New York in 1942.](http://jackiewhiting.net/US/RosieLyrics.html) When it was released is uncertain; the linked article says 1943, but I've found multiple sites that say it came out in mid- to late 1942. I went with the earlier release date. 
> 
> Here are the lyrics:
> 
> While other girls attend their fav’rite cocktail bar  
> Sipping martinis, munching caviar  
> There’s a girl who’s really putting them to shame  
> Rosie is her name
> 
> All the day long whether rain or shine  
> She’s a part of the assembly line  
> She’s making history,  
> working for victory  
> Rosie the Riveter  
> Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage  
> Sitting up there on the fuselage  
> That little frail can do  
> More than a male will do  
> Rosie the Riveter
> 
> Rosie’s got a boyfriend, Charlie  
> Charlie, he’s a Marine  
> Rosie is protecting Charlie  
> Working overtime on the  
> riveting machine  
> When they gave her a production “E”  
> She was as proud as a girl could be  
> There’s something true about  
> Red, white, and blue about  
> Rosie the Riveter
> 
> Everyone stops to admire the scene  
> Rosie at work on the B-Nineteen  
> She’s never twittery, nervous or jittery  
> Rosie the Riveter  
> What if she’s smeared full of oil and grease  
> Doing her bit for the old Lendlease  
> She keeps the gang around  
> They love to hang around  
> Rosie the Riveter
> 
> Rosie buys a lot of war bonds  
> That girl really has sense  
> Wishes she could purchase more bonds  
> Putting all her cash into national defense  
> Senator Jones who is “in the know”  
> Shouted these words on the radio  
> Berlin will hear about  
> Moscow will cheer about  
> Rosie the Riveter!
> 
> If you were wondering why how the character got the name of Rosie, that's because the song was written about a particular woman--[Rosalind Palmer (later Walter) of Long Island, the daughter of Carleton Palmer, a rich man who owned a major pharmaceutical company](http://kaiserpermanentehistory.org/latest/rosie-the-riveters-tough-image-morphs-to-fit-the-times/). Apparently she joined the night shift at a local defense plant as soon as she graduated from high school, which impressed Evans and Loeb quite a lot.
> 
> ***
> 
> MULTIRACIAL ROSIES
> 
> The named photos are all present to say one thing: no matter how vilely racist some white Rosies were--sometimes to the point of going on strike at being told to work with women who weren't white--and no matter how Rosie herself was depicted, Rosie really _did_ represent women of all races in reality as well in the story. Finding names to go with photographs was a _lot_ more difficult, however...and I felt that their being named in this was vital.
> 
> Here are more sites that might be of interest:
> 
> [15 Rare Photos of Black Rosie the Riveters](http://www.stuffmomnevertoldyou.com/blog/gallery/15-rare-photos-of-black-rosie-the-riveters/) (slideshow, but not automated)  
> [A real-life "Rosie the Riveter" operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, Tennessee, working on an A-31 Vengeance dive bomber, circa February 1943](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rosie_the_Riveter_\(Vultee\)_DS.jpg).  
> [Pinterest: World War II--Blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, Japanese, women](https://www.pinterest.com/catherineligon/world-war-ii-blacks-native-americans-mexicans-japa/)  
> [I, Too, Am Rosie](https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2014/03/11/i-too-am-rosie/) (features a couple of automated slideshows about black Rosies)


	2. The Wager of WIllow Run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosie tries to win a bet and protect her people at the same time.

When a girl of seventeen named Geraldine (almost sings, doesn't it?) was photographed in a metal presser factory in a town with the improbable name of Inkster, Michigan, wearing Rosie's bandana, well, it's not too strange that an artist thought she would make the perfect model for Rosie. 

Geraldine wasn't planning on staying at the factory—it was a temporary job from the beginning—and a terrible accident that mangled a co-worker's hand frightened her into quitting only a week after she started, for she was a cellist and needed two good hands to play. But it didn't matter. She was there long enough to lend Rosie a face, and it was just unfortunate that so many people believed it to be the _only_ face. As if a hero-spirit-god had to be that limited!

What you might not suspect was that the factory owners (I won't mention names, but their brand name is practically synonymous with fridges and freezers) wanted that poster for an anti-union drive. The "We" in "WE CAN DO IT!" meant the workers and the owners, the former obeying the latter with devoted loyalty…not doing something inconvenient like going on strike.

They reckoned without Rosie the Riveter. Rosie didn't give two hoots and a holler about bosses who'd put profit ahead of things like worker safety and quality goods. As far she was concerned, that was just plain un-American; you couldn't win a war by treating your people as if they were servile lumps or rebellious enemies. "We" was everyone working as a team; "we" was "We the people." So she co-opted that poster and she did it quick. 

You know how you can read a story or watch a film and all you can see is one thing, even you know the makers intended something else? That's what happened here. It didn't matter how much the owners tried to emphasize that the poster was supposed to inspire workers to listen to their bosses and obey them even more than they already did. That wasn't the message their workers heard—or the one the country heard. It spread like wildfire; in modern terms, it went viral. Like the song that helped birth Rosie, everyone was singing the same tune. 

The factory owners couldn't even do much to discourage Rosie's message. Everyone working together to win the war was not only patriotic but something that was _supposed_ to inspire people. Protesting that, at least in public, would have been like kicking a Christmas puppy. There are things you just can't do and still be seen as good.

And the more people believed, the stronger Rosie got. Another image appeared, this one on the cover of the _Saturday Evening Post_ , showing Rosie as a strong redhead with her welder's mask pushed onto the top of her head, her rivet gun in her lap, a ham sandwich in one hand (positioned as if she was toasting America), and _Mein Kampf_ crushed under her workboot. 

That picture, drawn by an illustrator that the whole country trusted, captured the imagination of millions. Soon Rosie's girls were breakin' all sorts of records. The capper came a month after the magazine cover's premiere—June 1943, that would've been—when a twenty-two-year-old riveter in upstate New York and her work partner drilled nine hundred lap joint holes and drove 3,345 rivets into the tail end of a torpedo bomber between midnight and six one night—and not a single hole or rivet had to be redone. The partner was twenty-eight-year-old Jennie Fiorito. The riveter? Well, it didn't come as any surprise that she was a real-life Rosie. Rosina Bonavita. Rose of the good life.

Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was impressed, sending Rosina and Jennie letters of commendation. And when another team of riveters broke their record, Rosina, who by then had married, decided that she'd show _them_ who was boss and, with another partner—this one named Susan Esposito—built an entire wing assembly in four hours and ten minutes.

([Rosie Bonavita Hickey, right, set her second speed record in 1944 with riveting partner Susan Esposito, left, at the Eastern Aircraft Division plant in Tarrytown, N.Y.](http://www.lowcountrynewspapers.net/archive/node/164892#storylink=cpy))

But you know how it is. Once you start doing extraordinary things, people want more. And soon enough, a supervisor from a plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan issued a challenge. His plant, which was called Willow Run, was a wonderment among politicians, though it might have been a nightmare for some defense workers; a B-24 bomber rolled off the line every sixty-three minutes, and Willow Run _never_ closed.

But that didn't satisfy the supervisor. He demanded that bombers be completed every forty-five minutes—hell, every half hour. The workers pointed out patiently that the plant equipment wasn't built to handle that rate of production, but that only threw the supervisor into a conniption fit at the thought of such horrendous disrespect. How dare anyone suggest that he didn't know what he was doing?!

So the Willow Run workers found a piece of scrap metal, painstakingly etched a message to Rosie on it—no point in wasting perfectly good rivets, after all—and then melted the scrap metal down.

Why go to all that trouble? Because they wanted to be sure she received it, of course! It wasn't as if they could mail scrap metal to Rosie the Riveter, care of America. But messages can have souls, especially if they're worked and slaved over. (Not always _kindly_ souls, mind. People do work and slave over nightmarish things.) And once the physical message was dead, where could the soul of the message go but to the entity to whom it was addressed?

When she read the Willow Run workers' plea for help, Rosie was sorely displeased, for she saw the same thing that they did: that the supervisor's demands would just lead to higher and higher quotas that would run past human limits in less than half no time. _She_ could fulfill such demands without a thought, providing she had the materials, but her followers could not, and doing so would take a terrible toll on them. And showing him how foolish he was being might well lead to him lashing out at the workers, laying off or firing employees he deemed argumentative, troublemaking, or lazy.

 _No,_ she decided. _There must be a better way_.

About a week later—Bastille Day, it was—Rosie marched into the supervisor's office in the Willow Run plant and informed him that she'd come to accept his challenge to match or beat his plant's record, provided three days and nights were sufficient for him and provided he could obtain an unstaffed but well-supplied and fully operational plant for her. This was more convincing than it might have been, because Rosie grew ten feet higher with each step, and she didn't allow the ceiling or the roof to prevent him from seeing, hearing, or talking to her.

Faced with the evidence of his own eyes (as well as the testimony of a number of other supervisors who were quick to tell him that he was indeed seeing what he thought he was seeing), he agreed reluctantly to try to find such a plant. But, he added, he hoped that she wouldn't mind if he bet on the outcome.

"Of course not," said Rosie cheerfully. "How about this? If I win, you buy twenty thousand war bonds. If you win, I'll give you all the metal both plants will ever need."

This did not suit the supervisor, who had been hoping for more immediate profit; war bonds took ten years to mature. Not to mention twenty thousand of them would cost him $375,000, which he said would ruin him. He offered to buy two thousand, saying that $37,500 was a bit more bearable. Rosie agreed—provided he could find nine friends to buy the remaining eighteen thousand. The supervisor agreed to this, though with gritted teeth.

Well, in three days, the supervisor not only got nine times nine people to pledge, in Rosie's presence, that they would buy two thousand war bonds apiece, but he also managed to find a semi-functional defense plant—or at least something that _could_ have been a defense plant, considering that it had once had a federal seal of approval. Here and there, walls bubbled and crumbled; brown water stains and black mold stained the ceiling; and oil seeped up through the floor. It was completely unstaffed, too, which was just as well, given the rust coating the machinery. The entire building reeked of the death of iron and steel.

It was anything but a fair place to put any challenger, even Rosie the Riveter, and tell her to outpace the Willow Run workers. But "Show 'em how it's done" was how the supervisor put it when he led Rosie in.

They say that the shock and wrath in her steely eyes nearly set fire to the air. But all she said was, "Very well. But you will stay and watch."

And stay he did; he might not have been able to leave, for Rosie was not in a mood at that moment to trust him. So he trudged after Rosie as she strode through the building and put it to rights; after all, Rosie's factory and the Willow Run one had to be identical in all respects or the test wouldn't be a fair one. Rust wiped itself away, leaving gleaming tools and machinery in its place; mold withered and dried up; the walls reconstructed themselves; the pipes leaking oil or water became whole once more. And once everything was perfect once more, Rosie—a somewhat wild-eyed supervisor beside her—took her place at the assembly line and began to work.

The supervisor swore later that as the line started to move, Rosie _blurred_ …and suddenly tens of thousands of women, all different and yet all bearing a stamp of something recognizably Rosie, began shaping, welding, polishing and riveting fuselages of patrol bombers. Each motion that each Rosie made was calm, deliberate and efficient—not a single false or hesitant movement, not a second wasted. She kept this up for three days and three nights, only pausing for rest or food when the Willow Run workers would have had to do the same.

Then, at midnight on the third night, 'Time!' was called in each factory, and friends of the supervisor shuffled into each factory, examining the results of the women's and Rosie's work. While the quality of Rosie's labor was flawless and that of the human employees less so, ounce for ounce, rivet for rivet, and pin for pin, the quantity of work done was exactly the same. Willow Run's record had not been broken—but it had been matched.

Rosie was delighted when the supervisor's friends phoned with the news that the contest had ended in a tie, and nothing would do but that she and the supervisor hurry back to Ypsilanti to congratulate the women who participated. The supervisor, realizing that he'd lost and would now have to spend almost thirty-eight thousand dollars of his own money, was less sanguine. (The bonds would turn into $50,000 in ten years, so he _would_ get his money back—but it was the principle of the thing.)

"Why'd you do so badly?" he snapped at her, his rage twisting his face into a monstrosity that would have done any Creature Feature proud. "You can't tell me that you couldn't have worked faster than _them_!" He made "them" sound as if it was coated in slime and mucus.

"I represent all women defense workers," Rosie replied in a completely reasonable tone. " _They're_ women defense workers. In a sense, they're me too. How could I outmatch myself?"

The supervisor wasn't satisfied, saying that she could have set a new record if she'd tried.

"Not without hurting my people," Rosie said in a shocked tone. "And it would have just misled you into thinking that anyone who couldn't do what I did was lazy, not overworked. That wouldn't be fair to anyone."

"It's still a cheat!" shouted the supervisor.

"Not at all. They did their level best."

"You didn't do yours!"

Rosie sighed. "Of course I didn't do _my_ best. I told you; that would hurt them. So I did _their_ level best instead. I did the very best that they can do right now—and they matched it easily."

And with that—and Rosie's payment of enough iron and steel to keep both plants going for half-past eternity—the supervisor had to be satisfied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Willow Run was a real defense plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan during WWII, and it really did have a record for production efficiency. However, the horrible supervisor in this section is completely imaginary and not based on anybody.
> 
> ***
> 
> The following articles talk about the various Rosie the Riveters:
> 
> [Rosie the Riveter: Real Women Workers in World War II](https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/journey/rosie-transcript.html)  
> [Meet the Real Rosie the Riveter](http://mentalfloss.com/article/63646/meet-real-rosie-riveter) (a Mental Floss article about Geraldine Hoff Doyle, the seventeen-year-old model for the "We Can Do It!" poster, and Mary Doyle Keefe, the nineteen-year-old neighbor of Norman Rockwell who became the basis for his redheaded Rosie)  
> ["Rosie the Riveter"](http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-01920.html) (which focuses on Rosina--here called Rose--Bonavita Hickey, Rosalind P. Walter, and Rose Will Monroe; it also has a detailed portion about Rosie in art and pop culture)  
> [The Complex Legacy of Rosie the Riveter](http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-complex-legacy-of-rosie-the-riveter/69268/) (it mentions Geraldine Hoff Doyle's reason for quitting while also going into extensive detail involving the sociological impact of Rosie)
> 
> [One article](http://ruzicastapinkidusica.blogspot.com/2013/07/rosie-riveter.html) featured a Rosie that I wish I could have brought up. Sadly, I couldn't find a way to do so. Her name was Norma Jean Dougherty, she was nineteen, and when her picture was taken in the Radioplane munitions factory, she was putting propellers on.
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> She was also the future Marilyn Monroe.


	3. Love Letters for the Boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosie and her boyfriends suffer from a communication problem.

In the beginning, when the one story about Rosie was a song, she only had one guy—Charlie the Marine. There wasn't much to him beyond his name and his branch of the Armed Forces. He was far away, a boyfriend fighting to win the war that Rosie protected by working overtime. 

But before six months had passed, three more guys had shown up: Joe, the definitive infantry grunt; Davy, the embodiment of all Naval sailors and all submariners; and the spirit of Army Air Force pilots, unimaginatively dubbed Ace. For his part, Charlie shifted with relative ease from being an ordinary human Marine to the essence of all Marines. All four loved Rosie, and Rosie, without reserve, loved all of them. 

No one was shocked by this, for Rosie, being a shapeshifting incarnation of patriotism, the home front, and female workers, wasn't precisely human, and rules have always been different for heroes, demigods and gods than they have been for the rest of the world. But even if she had been an ordinary woman…well, times change. Back then, dating multiple people—unless you were engaged or next thing to—was viewed not as adulterous or polyamorous, but simply normal. 

Of course, dating takes on a different meaning when there are four people in your life and every one of them is fighting a war hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. Rosie's boys could have left the site of whatever battle they were fighting to see her….but that would have resulted in mass desertions everywhere, which would have been catastrophic. And Rosie couldn't go to them; the home front can't leave home. And love letters are a bit difficult when the recipient is the embodiment of one of the Armed Forces and is present on multiple continents (and, occasionally, both hemispheres). So there they were, five heartsick spirits as powerless as mortals…and more than a little angry about it, too.

There are, sadly, a limited number of love tokens that the spirit of defense workers can send to the embodiments of the Armed Forces. Delicacies such as sugar and chocolate were no more common in the United States than on the front; Rosie was as yet too young to simply transmit thoughts and feeling that weren't linked to offerings to her fellow spirits; she would have dearly loved to send good weather, good health, or good luck to her boys, but such things weren't within her purview; writing messages on the sides of tanks and the bows of aircraft carriers would ensure that some of her boys received letters, but not all; and bombs, artillery shells and bullets weren't appropriate for expressing affection—really, who would examine each bullet for passionate words inscribed in etheric flame before firing it at the enemy?

Though she tried hard to be cheerful, knowing full well how many people's hopes were depending on her, gloom as thick as a pea-souper fog began wrapping itself around Rosie's heart. Soon, a pall swept over the entire nation as hope cooled. Knowing this, Rosie drove herself harder than ever…and grew sadder.

Now, it just so happened that there was a riveter at the same plant where Rosie had competed—a widow of twenty-four named Rose Will Monroe.

Willow Run was, by 1944, the largest defense plant in the world, so it was not too surprising that one of the actors noted for playing in propaganda films—his last name was Dove, or something like that—spotted her at work and asked if she would like to be Rosie the Riveter in a short to persuade people to buy more war bonds. Rose Will Monroe agreed; she was good at selling war bonds. Better, in fact, than Rosie herself.

Of course, as Rose Will Monroe and some of the other workers at Willow Run learned about the film, Rosie, too, inevitably heard about the biopic that wasn't—and she started thinking that war bonds and war stamps, being offerings from the home front, might do as a means of conveying affectionate missives and notes to Charlie, Joe, Ace and Davy. They wouldn't even have to hold the bonds or stamps to receive the messages. 

And so, on the day that Rose Will Monroe began shooting the first of two Rosie the Riveter shorts, Rosie the Riveter herself began attaching epistles of sentiment, passion, and not a little corniness to each stamp or bond purchased. Her method was simple; as soon as the item was bought, her boys would—is "sense" or "know" a better word?—what she was feeling and how she would put it into words. 

Her love letters were not elegant or poetic. They were merely unabashedly sincere. She was young, after all, and her four boys were her first loves. Fortunately, Rosie's fellows didn't object to a streak of corniness. Perhaps they knew true love when they heard it. And once they grasped what had caused a delay in communication, any irritation they might have felt dissolved. 

It seemed that all was well for Rosie again. Rosy, if you'll forgive the pun.

And then the war started winding down.


	4. A Slow Resurrection

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rosie is deemed non-essential. Rosie and her followers don't agree.

After years upon years of being praised as brave, patriotic and necessary, 1945 came as a nasty shock to Rosie and her followers. That was when they began hearing a rather different piece of propaganda from the same people who had praised them so highly for so long—that they were now no more than encumbrances and that they should put aside their war work, marry a veteran (if they weren't married to one already) and have babies. And while many of Rosie's followers wanted nothing more, others did not—or couldn't afford to.

Rosie fought for her ladies, and at least some kept jobs even after the war. But her victories were few. For the first time, one of her reasons for being—supporting women workers—was at odds with the others. It was no longer right for women to work, or so everyone seemed to insist. Veterans needed the jobs more than women did, even those with dead or disabled husbands or children. There were only so many jobs to go around. Women working wasn't…patriotic.

That last statement was the most vicious. Telling Rosie that she wasn't patriotic was akin to throwing her headfirst into a furnace and melting her down to slag, or drowning her in a vat of Lysol. 

So, bewildered, disowned, and wounded in a way that only a culture hero/demigod can be, she withdrew. And those who had turned on her rejoiced, feeling that she had served her purpose and was now dead (or as good as) and could be forgotten for a generation or two. If anyone after that troubled themselves to remember her, they would only smile at Rosie's quaintness—an oddity of the war years that could never, never be more than that. 

But the would-be banishers of Rosie had forgotten one thing: it is very, very difficult to annihilate a legend, especially when people who still believe in the legend are alive. And the former Woman Ordnance Workers—the riveters, the welders, the shipping workers, the ones who built railroads—were everywhere. So were the women who had never been defense workers but who had had sisters, mothers, daughters, cousins or best friends who had. And they did what humans always do when there's a myth or fragment of history that they consider worth recalling—they passed the story on.

 _Women_ can _do men's work,_ the whispers ran in kitchens, in car pools, as distractions for restive children while washing their hair. _Whole nations of women did for years. Those who fought World War II couldn't have won without us. Rosie the Riveter was our symbol—like Uncle Sam. The one who fought for us. Their—_ our— _queen._

And where was Rosie at this point?

Well, some said that she'd wafted off to some ethereal plane to heal, though she'd never been much for wafting before. Others insisted that she'd been maimed and disabled by the attack she'd suffered in the last days of the war and that she'd retreated to an abandoned factory in Montana and was slowly withering away. Still others—though they were primarily the ones who had sought to blot her out—swore that she'd gone to whatever mystical tomb holds the remnants of forgotten heroes and dead gods; some of these people alternated between that tale and the claim that Rosie had never existed in the first place. _Just a creature of propaganda posters_ , they smirked. _Don't be foolish. She wasn't real. She couldn't be._

They were all wrong. Rosie was an American and a woman who worked, and she wasn't going to stop being either. But defense work was thin during the Fifties, and it got downright disreputable in the Sixties. At last she had to admit that she couldn't be who she'd been any longer without completely altering who she was at heart. And so she set off on a journey around America.

She slipped under doors of libraries, learning from books that hadn't even been written in her time. She captured radio waves, listening to sounds and music drastically different from the sort that had given her birth. She tended urban gardens, even though, as she freely admitted, the only plants she was familiar with were defense plants. She studied machinery and listened as men and women, boys and girls explained how to make things work. A few small miracles recurred: surprise lunches for the hard-working and jobless; a sudden end to colds and nausea and fevers for teachers and daycare workers; hangovers and drug highs vanishing when inebriation and intoxication could lead to someone else suffering. Trivial, unimportant things…but Rosie had come to the conclusion that nothing was truly trivial. There were, she reflected, a lot of ways to work for a country's defense.

Then, in the early Eighties, someone—Rosie never knew who, though she had no doubt that the person was a grandchild of one of her girls—rediscovered the yellow poster, which was quickly proclaimed to be a feminist icon.

For Rosie, that swift, fierce belief that of _course_ women could do it, women could do _anything_ together, was as good as a shot of adrenaline. Belief was back, even though belief in what she represented had changed. 

_Old gods,_ as the poet said, _do new jobs._ Women believed in Rosie—and Rosie believed in them and what they'd taught her.

And from then on, there was no stopping her. In '94, a magazine made her a cover girl once again; in '99, the Postal Service granted her virtual immortality by putting her on a stamp (for stamps are part of history, and stamp collectors rarely forget). The "We Can Do It!" poster was put in the National Museum of American History. Her face adorned T-shirts, vending machines, coffee mugs, sweaters, even tattoos. A thousand black artists drew Rosie as a black woman (which Rosie, protean creature that she was and is, absolutely loved). People drew and painted and cosplayed hijabi Rosies. Artists and photographers portrayed Rosie in different cultures: Mexico, India, Slovenkia, and more. She wasn't solely an American icon any longer. Those who believed in and were inspired by her came from everywhere.

So perhaps it was fitting that Rosie's favorite post-WWII portrayal of her was not by an American at all, but by a Canadian variously known as Valentin Brown and Chelsoir, in which a trans woman, a black woman and a hijabi woman with their arms upraised, shouting, "We ALL can do it!"

Just envision it—Rosie gazing at an image of three women that she, polymorph that she is, was never allowed to be depicted as during the war. Imagine the glint in her dark eyes that might be joy or pride or maybe a heartfelt tear. Picture her lips shaping the words, _Damn straight we can,_ before they curve into a delighted smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It didn't seem right to post a pic of the artist's work (or a link to it mid-story), but you can buy the inclusive picture that I mentioned [here](http://fineartamerica.com/featured/we-all-can-do-it-valentin-brown.html).


End file.
